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Archive 2013 · External HD crashed

  
 
Bifurcator
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p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · External HD crashed


sjms wrote:
I use the momentus XT hybrids in my main and laptop as boot drives. quick (though not as an SSD) and reliable so far. less pricey. have experienced less then satisfactory results with SSDs but they are getting more reliable. the "wear factor" is of concern but maybe overstated. when a 512GB falls below $200 i'll give it a serious go. I do have a 256GB to play with for now.

my laptop is mSATA drive capable too.





Bifurcator wrote:
Well, They have been selling for right around or under $150 for awhile now and just very recently they've come down to around $75. The newer 750gb SSHD drives are out and they're hitting at around $120 or so.

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momentus-Solid-Hybrid-ST95005620AS/dp/B003NSBF32/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358041202&sr=8-1&keywords=seagate+512gb+sshd

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momentus-7200RPM-Hybrid-ST750LX003/dp/B00691WMJG/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1358043383&sr=1-1&keywords=seagate+750gb+sshd

So whip out the wallet bro!

I wanna get like 8 of them and put them in a RAID0 array.
Of course going for the record would be hard now

but 8 of them is doable on my bus and prolly fast enopugh.

I guess the laptop market is to blame for the better (falling) prices. I recently when down
...Show more




sjms wrote:
maybe you didn't read my first line. please review. that is exactly the Hybrid drives I have been using. you will note the similar name that I used as in "Momentus XT".
(2) 750 and (1) 500. the 500 is a first gen and runs a little warm. currently using as a external drive. been working them for a few years now.





Oh, you're saying that when 500gb SSD drives drop down below $200 you'll give them a go?

I wonder if they ever wiil? I mean now that SSHD are bumping against 1TB, have relatively the same speed as SSDs and will sell for less than or about $150 then the future I see for SSD is somewhere in or near the trash heap. With this being the case unit sales will drop dramatically and that means both profit margins (returns on engineering) and corporate interests (market projections) will fall. If/when that happens and it seems to be happening as we speak, SSD products will be relegated to very small firms charging even more than the current prices.

One possible future anyway...










Jan 12, 2013 at 11:02 PM
sjms
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p.2 #2 · p.2 #2 · External HD crashed


yes I possibly will


Jan 13, 2013 at 10:11 AM
EB-1
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p.2 #3 · p.2 #3 · External HD crashed


sjms wrote:
this is the reason you buy a good HD and place it in a good case. warranty is generally longer and you can swap out as you needs arise within the limits of the case.


You can do that for smaller drives, but the WD 2TB is a 2.5", 15mm height 5V drive. I know there are some cases for 12.5 mm drives (max 1.5TB currently), but I don't know of any for 15mm drives. Additionally there are few if any of the bare drives for sale. Of course I have a number of the old and new 1TB 9.5mm drives in USB 3.0 enclosures, for the usual reasons. Recently I started using the 2TB externals and the extra space is welcome. I normally have 2-3 copies of data, so I'm not very concerned if there is a device failure or luggage issue.

I'd like to see 1.5TB 9.5mm, 2TB 12.5mm, and 3TB 15mm mobile drives later this year, but it may be a bit longer.

EBH



Jan 13, 2013 at 07:58 PM
Rogue416
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p.2 #4 · p.2 #4 · External HD crashed


Bifurcator wrote:
Oh, you're saying that when 500gb SSD drives drop down below $200 you'll give them a go?

I wonder if they ever wiil? I mean now that SSHD are bumping against 1TB, have relatively the same speed as SSDs and will sell for less than or about $150 then the future I see for SSD is somewhere in or near the trash heap. With this being the case unit sales will drop dramatically and that means both profit margins (returns on engineering) and corporate interests (market projections) will fall. If/when that happens and it seems to be happening as we speak,
...Show more

SSD's are a still maturing technology. 500 GB SSD's will get to or below $200 in several years. SSD's have a strong future ahead of them co-existing with traditional HDD's.

Read: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/08/02/no-solid-state-drives-are-not-going-to-kill-off-hard-drives/

Just my two cents...



Jan 15, 2013 at 01:31 AM
Bifurcator
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p.2 #5 · p.2 #5 · External HD crashed


Bifurcator wrote:
Oh, you're saying that when 500gb SSD drives drop down below $200 you'll give them a go?

I wonder if they ever wiil? I mean now that SSHD are bumping against 1TB, have relatively the same speed as SSDs and will sell for less than or about $150 then the future I see for SSD is somewhere in or near the trash heap. With this being the case unit sales will drop dramatically and that means both profit margins (returns on engineering) and corporate interests (market projections) will fall. If/when that happens and it seems to be happening as we speak,
...Show more
Rogue416 wrote:
SSD's are a still maturing technology.

So was video tape. Something better knocked it into the dust bin though.

The potential almost any technology is at the mercy of consumer interest. In the case of video tape for example it doesn't matter that the density could have been increased 10 fold, the frequency increased, or digital tracks be added, people stopped wanting it and/or using it and it died. Given the cost per meg, the size limitations, and the short life span of current SSD drives along with the fact that SSHD drives solve all those problems and are relatively just as fast I think spells the demise of SSD drives in the very near future.

Of course it's all speculation so we will just have to wait and see. I thought my last visit to the mega-store was a pretty big indication though: All notebook computers came standard with SSHD - or had some proprietary storage. Not one came standard with SSD - tho it was an option in some for like an extra $300 (for a smaller capacity unit). If that trend is already or becomes international I can't see SSDs surviving for long.



Jan 18, 2013 at 09:41 AM
15Bit
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p.2 #6 · p.2 #6 · External HD crashed


I'm not sure i agree with you here Bifurcator - SSHD drives strike me as a bridge technology, leading us from spinning magnetic storage to SSD's. The cost per Gb of SSD's is dropping steadily, and whilst they aren't yet in spitting distance of spinning drives they are at least in the same ballpark and closing the gap. We can come back to this topic in 5 years maybe (with appropriate "i told you so"'s), but i do believe SSD's are the future.

I also don't think they have such a limited lifespan. The per-cell write cycles (typically 2000-5000 writes?) do look low, but summed over the whole disk this corresponds a lifespan of 5+ years even if you write out many gigabytes per day of data. Do you trust your spinning disks to last 5 years? Plenty of mine certainly haven't. And even those that do generally get replaced in that time on the grounds of capacity.



Jan 18, 2013 at 12:24 PM
binary visions
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p.2 #7 · p.2 #7 · External HD crashed


^ Agreed.

Longevity is almost a non-issue now. Current consumer flash cells are good for at least 10,000 writes these days, and most enterprise flash cells are good for 100k or more, which, of course, trickle down to consumer drives as time passes.

With wear-leveling algorithms, the reality is that you could write a hundred gigs per day to your flash drives for a decade or more before wearing it out. For consumers, this makes the "wearing out" of SSDs simply irrelevant. There's still something of a concern in the server space, but now storage area networks are simply being populated with some SSDs and some HDs, and the controllers are intelligently moving data around - like a glorified SSHD.

The thing is, SSHDs do not solve all the problems that SSDs do and I just don't see them surviving the rapid drop in the cost of flash memory. With SSDs providing lower power consumption, highly accelerated speeds for all data (not just that which has been cached), and providing a far more flexible form factor (don't underestimate that one) - SSHDs are a stop-gap.



Jan 18, 2013 at 01:56 PM
Rogue416
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p.2 #8 · p.2 #8 · External HD crashed


Bifurcator wrote:
So was video tape. Something better knocked it into the dust bin though.

The potential almost any technology is at the mercy of consumer interest. In the case of video tape for example it doesn't matter that the density could have been increased 10 fold, the frequency increased, or digital tracks be added, people stopped wanting it and/or using it and it died. Given the cost per meg, the size limitations, and the short life span of current SSD drives along with the fact that SSHD drives solve all those problems and are relatively just as fast I think spells
...Show more

Us consumers can be a picky bunch, can't we?

The cost per meg is slooowly coming down for SSD's, and I agree that they are still expensive. For example, Intel has an 800GB PCI Express MLC Internal Solid State Drive that goes for $4,099!!! Granted it is aimed at the enterprise, but holy crap that is expensive for 800GB. Their 600GB goes for almost $1,000. That is also expensive. When SSD's first came on to the scene, they were being used by people that had to have bleeding edge technology in their builds: Gamers. It will be some time before they become "mainstream". Like you said, we will have to wait and see.

Trent



Jan 18, 2013 at 10:50 PM
Rogue416
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p.2 #9 · p.2 #9 · External HD crashed


15Bit wrote:
Do you trust your spinning disks to last 5 years? Plenty of mine certainly haven't. And even those that do generally get replaced in that time on the grounds of capacity.



I may be in the minority here, but, in November of last year I finally retired a 75GB IBM Deskstar HDD that I have had since 2001. This was one of the drives that was only lasting a few months back then. Sure there were some bad sectors on it, but it still worked. That drive was home to my OS for several years and then relegated to gaming duty and finally in a home built DLNA server. I only retired it because I needed more capacity.

Trent




Jan 18, 2013 at 11:05 PM
15Bit
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p.2 #10 · p.2 #10 · External HD crashed


Rogue416 wrote:
I may be in the minority here, but, in November of last year I finally retired a 75GB IBM Deskstar HDD that I have had since 2001. This was one of the drives that was only lasting a few months back then. Sure there were some bad sectors on it, but it still worked. That drive was home to my OS for several years and then relegated to gaming duty and finally in a home built DLNA server. I only retired it because I needed more capacity.


You are in the minority - there is a reason they were nicknamed "Deathstars". I believe those drives were in a large part responsible for IBM selling up and leaving the HDD market.



Jan 19, 2013 at 01:48 AM
Bifurcator
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p.2 #11 · p.2 #11 · External HD crashed


I too have always had exceptionally good luck with the IBM DS drives. They last forever. I was using 2 cases of them all at once at one point. (24 in a case). Great drives in their day! I was using the 360GB (I think?) models in a VOD system I maintain as a PT job. That was when they were still branded IBM. They had a very good reputation with system engineers too - in spite of their (apparent) reputation with end users. <shrug>


Bifurcator wrote:
Oh, you're saying that when 500gb SSD drives drop down below $200 you'll give them a go?

I wonder if they ever wiil? I mean now that SSHD are bumping against 1TB, have relatively the same speed as SSDs and will sell for less than or about $150 then the future I see for SSD is somewhere in or near the trash heap. With this being the case unit sales will drop dramatically and that means both profit margins (returns on engineering) and corporate interests (market projections) will fall. If/when that happens and it seems to be happening as we speak,
...Show more
Rogue416 wrote:
SSD's are a still maturing technology.

Bifurcator wrote:
So was video tape. Something better knocked it into the dust bin though.

The potential almost any technology is at the mercy of consumer interest. In the case of video tape for example it doesn't matter that the density could have been increased 10 fold, the frequency increased, or digital tracks be added, people stopped wanting it and/or using it and it died. Given the cost per meg, the size limitations, and the short life span of current SSD drives along with the fact that SSHD drives solve all those problems and are relatively just as fast I think spells
...Show more
Rogue416 wrote:
Us consumers can be a picky bunch, can't we?

The cost per meg is slooowly coming down for SSD's, and I agree that they are still expensive. For example, Intel has an 800GB PCI Express MLC Internal Solid State Drive that goes for $4,099!!! Granted it is aimed at the enterprise, but holy crap that is expensive for 800GB. Their 600GB goes for almost $1,000. That is also expensive. When SSD's first came on to the scene, they were being used by people that had to have bleeding edge technology in their builds: Gamers. It will be some
...Show more

Yeah, I guess wrong as often as I get things right - maybe more. But it seems to me that when that happened HDDs were typically clocking in at around 65MB/s and even a 4-drive RAID0 had trouble keeping up. These days HDDs clock in at 250 to 300MB/s (costing about $100ea) so just a 2-drive stripe catches that fastest desktop grade SSD - which sells for about $500. I mentioned in another thread that a 3 or 4 drive stripe set will of course snuff the SSD, still be cheaper, and give you 9 to 12TB (when 3TB drives $100 are used).

Here's my setup using 6 of these 3TB drives at $100ea (total $600) reposted here:




Three 2-drive sets using the $100 3TB Barracuda ST3000DM001





Here's what the 2-drive 6TB RAID0 stripes profile like. This is with lots of data already on too.
With a 3-drive RAID0 stripe I get about 750MB/s and with four drives I get close to 1GB/s.
And of course with 4 of these drives we are talking about 12TB of storage space for $400.






Jan 20, 2013 at 01:16 AM
15Bit
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p.2 #12 · p.2 #12 · External HD crashed


I seem to remember it was the 75GB IBM's that were mostly the problem. A little google work even suggests that there was a class action suit filed about their reliability. I have a suspicion a lot of reliability problems at the time related to cooling - consumer level cases at the time were not well designed, and a lot of folk did tend to stuff as many drives as they could in a case. I remember i used to buy dedicated cooling fans for my drives, and i did tend to have less trouble than my friends. Your reliability experience would reflect the proper cooling of an enterprise level system.

Bifurcator - thats a damn fast RAID setup you have. From the reviews i've seen spinning disks are still at the 150MB/sec level, unless you buy Raptors or enterprise drives. So your 2 drive RAID 0 stripes seem oddly fast if that is a sustained rather than burst rate.

Still, for applications like photo and video editing, where the data will tend to be stored sequentially, i'm not convinced an SSD is perceptively any faster than a spinning disk. I've empirically compared having my RAW's on an SSD (a second SSD, not the one i boot from) and a spinning HDD and i can't see any difference in load times for LR and Photoshop. The big performance improvement is in random i/o, and then hosting the OS and stuff like swap/temp files on the SSD is where you really feel the speed.

Edited on Jan 23, 2013 at 01:05 AM · View previous versions



Jan 20, 2013 at 02:16 AM
Bifurcator
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p.2 #13 · p.2 #13 · External HD crashed


75GB... yeah, that's prehistorical. I think the first time IBM drives were recommended to me (by the DV techs at NewTek) we were at 120GB as the typical cost performance size. Prior to that it was AV drives with special thermal recalibration abilities.

Yup, if you're doing the 4k tests (icon loading, DB/SS manipulations, or rebooting your system every 30min.) then I think an SSD might actually have a place in a DT/WS computer. My machine stays on 24/7 tho and the smallest files I care about the speed of are 15 to 20mb, very often 100 to 500MB, and occasionally 1 to 10GB. So those are the only specs I care about really. I think even if I were booting/rebooting twice or thrice a day I wouldn't care about the boot speed - thus why I decided to boot from USB 2.0 as standard procedure. Icons and small often used OS files all get cached anyway so their i/o is either at the speed of the drives interface - usually around 400MB/s from a single drive and 7 or 800MB/s from a 2-drive stripe set, or RAM speed which is even faster if you have lots of RAM. OS's these days are good that way. All of your RAM can be used for cached OS files - which builds as you use. The first time in (via USB2.0) might be a tad slow (tho not noticeably for me) but on second take you're reading them at 2, 4, or 6GB/s depending on your motherboard. So if you have 24 or 32GB of RAM then just give half or a quarter to your bigger apps and the OS will (almost) always be instantaneous for (almost) everything you do.

On my RAID0 benchmark that's asynchronous uncached I/O. If I drag and drop a 20gig folder of 15 to 20MB image files (just tested 3x) from one to the other I get about 410MB/s.



Jan 20, 2013 at 05:57 AM
15Bit
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p.2 #14 · p.2 #14 · External HD crashed


I don't think i'd choose to boot from an external drive, but if it works well for you who am i to criticise?

I've figured out why your RAID seems oddly fast to me - average sequential transfer rates on those drives is around 150-160MB/sec, but peak (outer sectors i expect) is close to 200MB/sec. I guess that you are using the outer sectors for that test. Even 150MB/sec is pretty damn fast mind

There are a couple of advantages to SSD's not related to performance - in a laptop they are more tolerant to being thrown around than spinning disks, and they use less power. Comparing my SSD-equipped laptop with my colleague's equivalent with a spinning disk i get about an extra 45-60 mins battery life. Not to be sniffed at...



Jan 20, 2013 at 06:13 AM
Aaron D
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p.2 #15 · p.2 #15 · External HD crashed


Bifurcator wrote:
http://tesselator.gpmod.com/Images/Temporary/1_20_13_7_18_AM.png
Here's what the 2-drive 6TB RAID0 stripes profile like. This is with lots of data already on too.
With a 3-drive RAID0 stripe I get about 750MB/s and with four drives I get close to 1GB/s.
And of course with 4 of these drives we are talking about 12TB of storage space for $400.




Holy crap! 500+ MB/s write on a 2 drive RAID0?

I have a question for you sir. I have been toying with the idea of building something to capture uncompressed 1080 video. We're talking close to 200MB/s of bandwidth at 24bits of color depth. What kind of write speed are you getting on files in excessive size? Say 500MB and up? Have you tested sizes this large Bif? These are 'cudas, correct?

How are you getting 200+MB/s out of a single, rotary type, HDD What kind of controller are you using if I may ask?



Jan 20, 2013 at 02:47 PM
15Bit
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p.2 #16 · p.2 #16 · External HD crashed


Aaron, if you want to capture at that sort of rate, streaming onto hard disks might not be the best solution. We've set up equipment that streams data at quite high data rates in the lab, and the best solution is a RAM drive if you can stuff enough RAM into a computer for the data you want to collect. Also, how are you intending to feed the data into the computer? Good quality i/o cards are essential for this sort of work.


Jan 20, 2013 at 03:41 PM
Aaron D
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p.2 #17 · p.2 #17 · External HD crashed


15Bit wrote:
Aaron, if you want to capture at that sort of rate, streaming onto hard disks might not be the best solution. We've set up equipment that streams data at quite high data rates in the lab, and the best solution is a RAM drive if you can stuff enough RAM into a computer for the data you want to collect. Also, how are you intending to feed the data into the computer? Good quality i/o cards are essential for this sort of work.


That was a thought. I remember playing with RAM drives back in DOS. But when talking about an hour or so's worth of footage, 500GB to 1TB is A LOT of RAM. Gives me food for thought though. Cost has to be low, and so does size. Capturing to a RAM drive would help by eliminating physical drives. It would also reduce power requirement. You've opened my eyes to some new ideas to look into. Thanks!

Data would be fed via HDMI due to lack of BNC. Have been able to find 1 or 2 cards that will capture 1080/30p, uncompressed, for under $200.



Jan 20, 2013 at 03:57 PM
Alan321
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p.2 #18 · p.2 #18 · External HD crashed


I've never bought enterprise grade drives but I've had quite a few standard drives die on over the years (decades) and that covers all of the brands before they started merging. My experience was that none were more reliable than others. My friends would complain about brand X for which I had no problems at the time and I would complain about brand Y for which they had no problems at the time.

I think the on-time is a significant user of drive life but so is starting and to a lesser extent stopping the drives. You can have a drive die with relatively few hours of use but a great many start-ups and that reduces its life.

Having multiple backups and backups of backups is the safest option but it costs more to set up and to run. It takes more of our time and discipline to manage it too, as well as the electricity.

As an aside, it always fascinated me that it was possible to precisely calculate the loss of life for a power transformer (or other equipment) based on how often and for how long it was stressed at high temperatures but we never, ever knew precisely what its original lifespan was and so it wasn't much help. My experience was that if you let the smoke out then you definitely knew that it was really dying right now I think drives are a bit like that too.

If you're really, really lucky then a drive will die suddenly without first corrupting data over an extended period before you notice it, and thus affecting your backups too. It will also be far easier to identify the dead component. The worst thing is to lose faith in a whole computer because you can't isolate an intermittent fault and therefore cannot tell which component is dying.



Jan 20, 2013 at 09:59 PM
Alan321
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p.2 #19 · p.2 #19 · External HD crashed


Aaron D wrote:
That was a thought. I remember playing with RAM drives back in DOS. But when talking about an hour or so's worth of footage, 500GB to 1TB is A LOT of RAM. Gives me food for thought though. Cost has to be low, and so does size. Capturing to a RAM drive would help by eliminating physical drives. It would also reduce power requirement. You've opened my eyes to some new ideas to look into. Thanks!

Data would be fed via HDMI due to lack of BNC. Have been able to find 1 or 2 cards that will capture 1080/30p,
...Show more

A potential problem with RAM drives is that the operating system may be dumb enough to cache it just like it does with slower drives (e.g. Mac OS X). That potentially doubles the RAM needed. And the more RAM you have the bigger the sleep file on the main drive, which is a nuisance if your main drive is a speedy SSD and a big chunk of it is pretty much being wasted.



Jan 20, 2013 at 10:04 PM
Bifurcator
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p.2 #20 · p.2 #20 · External HD crashed


15Bit wrote:
I don't think i'd choose to boot from an external drive, but if it works well for you who am i to criticise?

I've figured out why your RAID seems oddly fast to me - average sequential transfer rates on those drives is around 150-160MB/sec, but peak (outer sectors i expect) is close to 200MB/sec. I guess that you are using the outer sectors for that test. Even 150MB/sec is pretty damn fast mind

There are a couple of advantages to SSD's not related to performance - in a laptop they are more tolerant to being thrown around than spinning disks,
...Show more

Of course, HDDs are only used to 60% (to 75% max) capacity unless you're in a pinch for the space or something. So always outer cylinders! Also when your drives start getting up around 75% full and past that's when trouble starts happening. I dunno why and the trouble are various but that's fairly well known common info I think.

Yup! SSDs are awesome in laptops and notebooks!! No arguments there. Still, I think I would rater go with 72000 SSHD in a laptop myself.








Edited on Jan 21, 2013 at 12:37 AM · View previous versions



Jan 20, 2013 at 11:06 PM
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